Video shows new perspective on skipping

A Melbourne artist has created a dizzying, vertigo-inducing video that shows life from the perspective of a skipping rope.

Artist and filmmaker Callum Cooper said Full Circle, a collaboration with sound designer John Kassab for fashion label Klezinski, was part of a series of works in which sculptures were used to create moving images.

The footage was shot with a specially-designed camera mount that swings over and under the subjects as they jump.

"I was looking to make a series of art works that revealed the playfulness in people," Cooper told ninemsn.

"Often when we engage in physical actions, particularly ones from our childhood, we find ourselves reconnecting with the past.

"When these actions are continuously repeated it can almost be like a joyous hypnosis.

"The film attempts to capture that moment and share it with the audience who will experience it too, through the dizzying perspective and the rotating effect."

Cooper has had the project displayed in galleries, where visitors were encouraged to shoot the videos themselves using a skipping rope with the resulting footage edited and projected on the walls.

The Full Circle video has also proved hugely popular online. It has been viewed more than 400,000 times and featured on numerous blog sites worldwide, including the Huffington Post.

Cooper said after growing up in the 1980s in Melbourne with only five television channels he loved that people now had the ability to view millions of channels of unique content online.

"We now have the unprecedented ability to reach out to individuals who might find resonance with what we make and actually interact with them regardless of geography," he said.

"Which is particularly great when you are based somewhere such as Australia."

Cooper, who is in New York doing an artist-in-resident program but usually splits his time between Melbourne and London, said he was now juggling numerous projects.

They included two more video/sculpture projects to be exhibited at the end of the month, a mobile phone app around biodiversity and food security and his debut feature film with ScreenAustralia.

On top of all this, he also plans to launch a media production and investment company Ardent Film Trust to go live in April.